Bad blogger, bad!

I have been a bad blogger.  Bad, bad, bad...  But, in my defense, nothing much has happened between the Fall colors and Christmas that would be of much interest.  In any case, Happy New Year!  

We are now officially half way through our mission, which is pretty amazing to us.  The time has gone extremely quickly.  

We have had an extremely mild winter so far.  It was in the 50's and 60's much of December, with no snow.  The first snowfall finally occurred a few days ago, but it was only an inch (the previous record here for the latest first snow was the 4th of December, so that was shattered by about three weeks). So far, El Nino has been our friend, but my guess is it won't last...

Our daughter Sarah spent a week with us at Christmas, which was fun.  We took her everywhere with us and she got to hang out with all the young missionaries at the mission Christmas party.  She has been accepted to be in the cast for the Hill Cumorah Pageant in July, so she'll be back here for three weeks then after completing her master's degree at Utah State (and before starting some very lucrative job somewhere, working for somebody, doing something...).

The sites were actually pretty busy between Christmas and New Years - mostly family visiting other family in this part of the country and taking the time to come to the sites.   But that honeymoon is over and from now until April it will no doubt be very slow.

"All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey."  (California Dreaming, Mommas and Pappas,  1966).  That pretty much describes things around here, except the grass is still green, which seems weird to us Colorado types.  The locals say it stays green all winter.  Who knew?   We've also learned they put tons of salt on the roads here when it snows.  Even the dusting we had brought truckloads of salt to every street in town.  If you don't wash your car every few days during the winter months, before long you're looking at the road through the rust holes between your feet.  It's amazing how many late model cars are completely eaten away.  

Okay now for some photos.  I decided to post sort of a review of the past nine months here in Palmyra.  Many of these you've seen before, but a few new ones thrown in.   Sort of in chronological order, mostly...